Mega plane to mitigate power crisis in Bangladesh. Sunday, February 05, 2012

To mitigate the power crisis in Bangladesh the government has set up in decision to shift from gas-based power generation to coal based power generation.
In line with its latest power sector master plan, the government has rolled out a massive plan to set up within a few years around 10 coal-based power plants having a total production capacity of around 7000 MW, more than the country can now generate.
The plants will run out on imported coal, using around 20 million tonnes a year worth $2 billion, which would put tremendous pressure on the country's foreign currency reserve.
The PDB believes such a huge spending would be possible given the current pace of export and industrialization growth. Its belief is seconded by the World Bank's forecast that Bangladesh will join middle income countries soon after 2016.
Given persistent gas crisis which is set to worsen from 2017, the government's new master plan on coal-based power development adopted last year says at least half of the country's demand for power should be met using coal for its cost effectiveness and stability of supply in the next two decades. More than half of this coal-based power has to be generate using local coal, it says.
By 2020, the plan looks at generating 9800 MW power from domestic coal and another 7800 MW from imported coal at a total cost of $26 billion. The remaining Power will be generated using gas, oil, renewable energy etc and that will need $ 13 billion more in investment. In the light of this, the CPGCB has been formed. Its main task is to spearhead all future public sector coal-based power projects. In addition it will also responsible for development of local coal fields and import coal. It will also hire a consultant to determine which would be the most suitable coal-field for fast development, and other procedures will follow.
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That's all for today. Wish you best of luck.
Eftekar Ahmed
Operations Engineer
Covanta Energy Ltd.